minor snow flurry last night.
Modestly tweaked in Photoshop, but not much.
Better viewed in Lightbox:
Author: swanksalot
Always good to have a second user look at things
links for 2011-01-08
-
An article on Friday about a legal dispute between American sunken treasure hunters and the government of Spain, in which the treasure hunters are using some of the confidential diplomatic cables obtained by WikiLeaks, referred incorrectly to the release of those cables. WikiLeaks has 251,287 cables and has released all of them to several news organizations; it has not released all of them publicly. (According to the State Department, about 2,700 of the cables have been made public to date.) The error also appeared on Dec. 4 in an article about the cables and in an Inside The Times capsule summary for that article.
-
LEED-bashing Reaches New Heights In Fast Companyby Lloyd Alter, Toronto on 01. 7.11DESIGN & ARCHITECTURE Image credit swanksalot via Creative Commons
-
Attribution: www.flickr.com/photos/swanksalot…This product uses the Flickr API but is not endorsed or certified by Flickr.
Floating Urban Diffusion
Shot with my Hipstamatic for iPhone
Lens: John S
Flash: Off
Film: Float
shot through my blind
links for 2011-01-05
-
As an accomplished street photographer, the late Vivian Maier discreetly chronicled life in Chicago’s Loop and surrounding districts for decades. After immigrating to the United States as a refugee from World War II France, she eventually ended up in Chicago as a nanny to wealthy North Shore clients, but her passions ran much deeper. Over 100,000 negatives and more than 3,000 prints of her massive body of work were discovered in an estate auction shortly before her death in 2009.
-
Leave it to an investigative journalist to dig up the dirt. Nora O'Donnell's recent essay on Vivian Maier delves deeper into her backstory than anything else I've seen. Thanks, Chicago Magazine.
While the basic outline of her life life is now fairly well established, Maier still remains something of a mystery. For me the most intriguing questions center on her photographic skill. How did she gain such a sharp eye? What training did she have? Which photographers or photographs did she come in contact with? Who if anyone helped her develop? Or was she a pure autodidact?
-
The Artist Formerly Known as Captain Beefheart is a BBC documentary from 1997, on the late, great Don Van Vliet. Its presented by the also late and lamented DJ, John Peel, who was once tour driver for Captain Beefheart, and contains contributions from Frank Zappa, John French, Ry Cooder, and Matt Groening.
-
Factory Records founder Anthony H Wilson died in August 2007. Just over three years later, a memorial headstone designed collaboratively by Wilson's long-term associates Peter Saville and Ben Kelly with Paul Barnes and Matt Robertson, was unveiled in The Southern Cemetery in Chorlton-Cum-Hardy, Manchester.
The black granite headstone carries a quote, chosen by Wilson's family, from The Manchester Man, the 1876 novel by Mrs G Linnaeus Banks (aka Isabella Varley Banks), the story of one Jabez Clegg and his life in Victorian Manchester. The quote is set in Rotis.
links for 2011-01-04
-
A profoundly enigmatic musical poet, there have been many documentaries about Glenn Gould, but they were typically sidetracked by his eccentricities, focusing on the pills and gloves and scarves – missing the man, the magic and the message behind his music. American Masters artfully pierces through the myths and misconceptions about this humming and hunched figure, whose fingers glided across the piano as no one’s before or since in Genius Within: The Inner Life of Glenn Gould. Watch the full film, available online until January 11, 2011 here online.
links for 2011-01-01
-
The film journeys northward from the heartland of rural Illinois to the mostly African-American and impoverished south side of Chicago; from Bridgeport, home to five generations of an Irish family named Daley, to Pilsen, hub of Chicago’s Hispanic community; from the colorful chaos of the Maxwell Street Market to the high-rise ghettos of the Cabrini Green public housing project; and from the yuppie boutiques and blues clubs of Lincoln Park to Lakeview, where Halsted is the backbone of Chicago’s gay community. …Narrated by Studs Terkel, Halsted Street, USA is a thought-provoking crash-course in American cultural geography that will enhance a variety of courses in American studies and history, popular culture, sociology, and ethnic studies and multiculturalism.
links for 2010-12-29
-
As business models go, there are currently two dominant ones: either people like your product enough to purchase it or they don’t care enough to buy it but will overlook its deficiencies if it’s “free” in exchange for their personal browsing and purchasing info sold to advertisers. The former model is Apple’s, the latter is Google’s. Apple sells emotional experiences. The price is what users pay to be delighted by Apple’s stream of innovations and to be free of the lowest common denominator burdens and the pervasive harvesting of their personal info. Google sells eyeballs. To be more precise, the clickstream attached to those eyeballs. Thus scale, indeed dominance, is absolutely crucial to Google’s model.
-
Even for someone who follows sustainable agriculture and animal welfare issues, this is pretty astounding: New analysis by the Center for a Livable Future shows that 80% of all antibiotics sold in the United States go to farm animals (Wired). The last time that stat was calculated, a decade ago by the Union of Concerned Scientists, it stood at 70%.
-
In recent weeks, NPR hosts, reporters and guests have incorrectly said or implied that WikiLeaks recently has disclosed or released roughly 250,000 U.S. diplomatic cables. Although the website has vowed to publish “251,287 leaked United States embassy cables,” as of Dec. 28, 2010, only 1,942 of the cables had been released.
links for 2010-12-23
-
“While the growth of incarceration took many dangerous offenders off the streets,” says an introduction to the website, “research suggested that it reached a point of diminishing returns, as recidivism rates increased and more than one million nonviolent offenders filled the nation’s prisons. In most states, prisons came to absorb more than 85 percent of the corrections budget, leaving limited resources for community supervision alternatives such as probation and parole, which cost less and could have better reduced recidivism among non-violent offenders.”
-
Citizen Action of Wisconsin had been spreading this message as much as it could prior to the election and following Walker's win, calling the move "economic treason," but it and others on its side were unable to keep Walker from canceling the project (which was already under construction). In addition to the rally, a bipartisan group of local communications professionals has gotten business leaders to sign a letter to Walker expressing their frustration and disappointment over this matter, as well as a request for "greater thoughtfulness, civility, creativity and compromise in the future."
In all honesty, I don't think they can expect much of that. Cancelling the high-speed rail project in Wisconsin is actually going to cost the state considerably more than operating the line would have cost it, strictly looking at direct funds (not even considering the jobs and economic growth that were lost).
— -
South Carolina’s favorite lifelong bachelor and former military prosecutor, is always reliably against homosexuals having any basic human rights in America because Lindsey’s a Republican, y’all. Anyway, famous outer-of-self-hating-queers Mike Rogers says he’s got pictures of one of Lindsey’s boy toys leaving Lindsey’s house. This would be SHOCKING because come on, everybody knows Republicans cannot be gay because Jesus did not make gays.”….A pair of tweets on Saturday from Michael Rogers, who claims a perfect outing record, suggests Graham – who continues to serve in the U.S. Air Force Reserves – might soon be deflecting more questions about his sexuality.“I wonder if Lindsey Graham knows I have pictures of a man who spent the night at his house. pls RT,” Rogers messaged his followers.
-
Speaker of the House Nancy Pelosi's transition to minority leader comes an interesting bit of news. The California Democrat, vilified by Republicans in the last election, has turned to director Steven Spielberg for help rebranding House Democrats.
Lawmakers say she is consulting marketing experts about building a stronger brand. The most prominent of her new whisperers is Steven Spielberg, the Hollywood director whose films have been works of branding genius
This Is Not A Pipe
Shot with my Hipstamatic for iPhone
Lens: John S
Flash: Off
Film: DreamCanvas
Wikipedia Entry:
en.wikipedia.org/wiki/The_Treachery_of_Images
The Treachery of Images (La trahison des images, 1928–29, sometimes translated as The Treason of Images) is a painting by the Belgian René Magritte, painted when Magritte was 30 years old. The picture shows a pipe. Below it, Magritte painted, "Ceci n’est pas une pipe”, French for "This is not a pipe." The painting is not a pipe, but rather an image of a pipe, which was Magritte’s point:
The famous pipe. How people reproached me for it! And yet, could you stuff my pipe? No, it’s just a representation, is it not? So if I had written on my picture "This is a pipe," I’d have been lying!
The original is in LA, on my list of places to visit.
We have no hours. We are always closed
Shot with my Hipstamatic for iPhone
Lens: John S
Film: Kodot Verichrome
Flash: Off
might be true in upcoming weeks at least
links for 2010-12-20
-
How many of these cables, rather than being the unvarnished facts which reveal the public lies are actually another layer of lies from bureaucrats trying to appease their bosses? It’s funny how transparency can reveal all sorts of unexpected things isn’t it? If only there were professional people who gather facts and research issues and interview subjects who could be called upon to investigate such things.
links for 2010-12-19
-
In an unsigned solicitous message posted on the Delicious blog, the company declared: "No, we are not shutting down Delicious. While we have determined that there is not a strategic fit at Yahoo!, we believe there is [an] ideal home for Delicious outside of the company where it can be resourced to the level where it can be competitive."
"We're in the process of exploring a variety of options and talking to companies right now," it added. "And we'll share our plans with you as soon as we can." Or, considering how the original news reached the public (a leaked slide from a company Webcast) until another embarrassing revelation occurs.
Cougar on the Prowl
What a vile creature Henry Kissinger is
Christopher Hitchens wonders why Henry Kissinger is even allowed to poke his head out in polite society…
One could have demanded this at almost any time during the years since his role as the only unindicted conspirator in the Nixon/Watergate gang, and since the exposure of his war crimes and crimes against humanity in Indochina, Chile, Argentina, Cyprus, East Timor, and several other places. But the latest revelations from the Nixon Library might perhaps turn the scale at last. (Click here to listen to the conversation; the offending section begins at 13:56.)
Chatting eagerly with his famously racist and foul-mouthed boss in March 1973, following an appeal from Golda Meir to press Moscow to allow the emigration of Soviet Jewry, Kissinger is heard on the tapes to say:
The emigration of Jews from the Soviet Union is not an objective of American foreign policy. And if they put Jews into gas chambers in the Soviet Union, it is not an American concern. Maybe a humanitarian concern. (One has to love that uneasy afterthought …)
In the past, Kissinger has defended his role as enabler to Nixon’s psychopathic bigotry, saying that he acted as a restraining influence on his boss by playing along and making soothing remarks. This can now go straight into the lavatory pan, along with his other hysterical lies. Obsessed as he was with the Jews, Nixon never came close to saying that he’d be indifferent to a replay of Auschwitz.
For this, Kissinger deserves sole recognition. It’s hard to know how to classify this observation in the taxonomy of obscenity. Should it be counted as tactical Holocaust pre-denial? That would be too mild. It’s actually a bit more like advance permission for another Holocaust.
Which is why I wonder how long the official spokesmen of American Jewry are going to keep so quiet. Nothing remotely as revolting as this was ever uttered by Jesse Jackson or even Mel Gibson, to name only two famous targets of the wrath of the Anti-Defamation League. Where is the outrage? Is Kissinger—normally beseeched for comments on subjects about which he knows little or nothing—going to be able to sit out requests from the media that he clarify this statement? Does he get to keep his op-ed perch in reputable newspapers with nothing said? Will the publishers of his mendacious and purloined memoirs continue to give him expensive lunches as if nothing has happened?
(click to continue reading The Nixon tapes remind us what a vile creature Henry Kissinger is. – By Christopher Hitchens – Slate Magazine.)
Busker – Marble Arch Station
Marble Arch, London
Playing either Bob Dylan or Radiohead, can’t remember.